Some of you may have noticed that my Etsy shop is looking more like a poor pitiful shop than an actual clothing store. OH WELL!!! I’m having such a great time getting my house in order that I don’t even miss creating new dresses…yet.

This weekend, I began the process of transforming my son’s room into something noteworthy. In our last home, we kept adding kids so the rooms never quite became anything worth anything. A quote from the first realtor to visit our old home and tour the kids’ room: “Oh my. Hmmmm. This will have to change.”

Well – I am now determined for that to change!!! Owen’s room is slated to have matching bedding, a curtained reading nook, curtains for his closet, and actually worthwhile things on his walls. (not that last time he had mis-matched girlie things on his wall, right!? cough cough)

Above is what I finished this weekend…. AAAAAHHH… it was SO fun!! My son is only 7 years old so I wasn’t expecting much of a reaction to something as useless to him as fabric on his bed. WRONG!!! I was downstairs when he first saw it… I heard something that sounded like Super Bowl screaming coming from his room. Then I heard, “MOOOOOM!!! This is the Best Day Ever!!” Be. Still. My. Heart! SEW worth it, right!?!

This has brought me such joy, I thought I’d spend the next few blog posts sharing with you how I upped the wow factor in his room. I’ll share tutorials on easy pillowcases, easy coverlets, and easy fabric curtain panels. I’m hoping that some of you will find these helpful!

Let’s start with the pillowcase… mostly because it’s fewer photos and that’s all I had time to download today. (Apparently, the kids’ school thinks they need to be wearing “official” uniforms and not chevron fabric, so laundry has to be done. UGH!)

If you google “how to make a pillow case”, you’re gonna find all kinds of crazy patterns that take about 14 or 15 steps. Seriously!?! It’s a pillow case. It’s gonna get drool and vomit on it. Why spend a whole day making one!!! Here’s I do it: Grab a pillow case that you already own. lay it on top of the fabric that you want to use. You can see here that my fabric is narrower than the pillowcase I’m using for my pattern, but it’s okay. It’s okay because it’s close enough. If it were much narrower, I probably wouldn’t use it, but since it’s close – bam. I’m using that baby! (also worth noting: I’m able to keep the selvege edges as they are. There is no need to hem them on this fabric. If you need to hem up the opening edges, you’ll need a little bit more fabric than I’m using.)

Be sure you match the folded edges together and the open edges together.

Then cut out your fabric just a bit larger on the sides than your pillowcase pattern. We’re going to do a French Seam, so you’ll want to cut your fabric about 1/4″ or so bigger than you usually would … but just eyeball it. Pillowcases are very forgiving!

A french seam is a seam that enclosed – meaning you can’t see the edges on the inside. It will make sense in a minute. I like to use this seam on pillowcases because they get a lot of laundering. The French Seams keep the inside of the cases nice and tidy. To do it – sew up the sides of the pillow case WRONG SIDE TOGETHER, I know, weird, and use a very narrow seam allowance.

Now, turn your pillow case inside out and press those sides.

Now you will do another seam down the sides. Be sure that your seam allowance it enough to fully encase the seam on the inside. If you do too small of a seam allowance, you’ll have fabric sticking out when you turn it back right side out. Now you have a French Seam Pillow Case.

Since I’m not hemming the selvedge edges (aka: leaving the opening unhemmed), I needed to be sure to reverse stitch my seams extra well and clip those tails very well.

This is kind of a whompy photo – but I wanted to show the inside so you can see the french seam. (at this point, I’m wondering why sometimes I capitalize French Seam and sometimes I don’t. Are you wondering that too?) Anyway, you can see the enclosed french seam on the right.

When you turn it right side out and press the side seams – Here’s what you get!!! I love it. It was super fast … that makes me so happy!

Coming next – how to make that easy coverlet! And I do mean easy!

There you have it y’all… how to make a very fast and easy pillow case!

Breakdown:

Time: I think this took me 15 minutes…and that was with taking pictures. You CAN DO THIS!!!

Cost: pretty darn cheap. I used leftover fabric from the coverlet … but lets’ see… I think I used about 1/2 yard of fabric, so for me – $3.50. YAAAAAAY!

I hope you’ll make a million of these. Be sure to invite someone over to spend the night just so you can offer them a brand spanking new pillowcase!